Read Planet Magazine first to get a sense of what we want in terms of style and story length.

Planet Magazine accepts original, unpublished, and complete short science fiction or fantasy stories and poems from any adult writer. Accepted stories will be proofread and minor changes (such as corrections to punctuation or spelling) may be made without contacting the author. For any higher-level changes, a rewrite or an update will be requested from the author. We reserve the right to reject any story or poem for any reason. Due to the volume of submissions, we cannot always critique rejected submissions.

WHAT WE DON’T LIKE:
We will immediately reject, without critique, straight fiction, love poems, simultaneous submissions, and stories already published or scheduled for publication in other zines. We will not publish anything we judge to be pornographic, gory, ultra-violent, perverse, or in violation (as far as we are able to tell) of any copyrights. For example, any story containing Klingons, Jedi, Fox Mulder, or Dr. Who, to name a few, will be immediately rejected — even though they are all a bunch of great guys, once you get to know them.

FORMAT OF SUBMISSIONS:
Send submissions as plain, unformatted text-only files (either as an e-mail attachment or, if it fits, in the body of an e-mail message) to editor@planetmag.com. Two submissions max at a time, please. Please put the name of the story or poem into the Subject line of the e-mail.

INFORMATION TO INCLUDE:
We need your first and last name, the title(s) of your work(s), a brief bio (preferably lighthearted) with any Web links, and a working e-mail address. Keep in mind that if we publish your work, we will use this info for your author’s bio. Please also confirm that the submission is original, written by you, and unpublished.

PAY:
None. Since Planet is free and carries no advertising, we can’t pay anything except the spirit-sustaining currency of free publicity and the life-enhancing good vibes you get from being in good company. No one on the staff of Planet, including the editor, receives any compensation for producing Planet Magazine. Many writers have started with Planet Magazine and gone on to paid markets and book publishing.

Artists:

NUMBER OF SUBMISSIONS:
E-mail submissions as attachments to editor@planetmag.com, but compress them first using StuffIt, WinZip, etc. Alternatively, you could send the URL for an image. We reserve the right to reject submissions for any reason. We will use previously created artwork if it fits well with a story scheduled for publication, but we also like to assign stories to be illustrated.

INFORMATION TO INCLUDE:
Please include your name, the title(s) of your artwork(s), a brief bio (preferably lighthearted) with any Web links, and a working e-mail address. Keep in mind that if we publish your work, we will use this info for your artist’s bio. Please also confirm that the submission is original, created by you, and not published, or scheduled to be published, in another zine. It’s OK if your unpublished artwork currently appears on your own website.

FILE FORMATS:
Art should be Web-ready and submitted in JPEG or GIF formats. JPEG set at high resolution is preferred.

IF WE ACCEPT YOUR ARTWORK:
Planet Mag will present your work in one or two ways:

1) Planet will present a cropped and/or scaled version that will be immediately visible to the user when they read the story, and/or

2) The image itself will be hyperlinked to the full-size, original image. The full-size, original image will, as much as possible, be kept intact. For server space considerations, we may have to scale it such that the full image doesn’t exceed 600 pixels wide or doesn’t exceed 400 pixels tall.

Note: We may be forced to reduce the image resolution for both versions so that the images will load in a timely manner.

PAY:
None. Since Planet is free and carries no advertising, we can’t pay anything except the spirit-sustaining currency of free publicity and the life-enhancing good vibes you get from being in good company. No one on the staff of Planet, including the editor, receives any compensation for producing Planet Magazine. Some Planet artists have gone on to produce work for mainstream publications.

A NOTE ABOUT COPYRIGHTS:

If Planet Magazine accepts a story, poem, illustration, or other work from you, you are granting us the right to publish it on the Web (keeping in mind that many people print out Planet to read it offline). The copyright otherwise remains with the author, poet, or artist. You should be aware that issues of Planet remain online indefinitely, so you must notify us via e-mail at editor@planetmag.com if you ever want your work removed from an issue of Planet Magazine. We will comply as soon as we can.